Assistant Professor, School of Biological and Health Systems Engineering, and the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes, Arizona State University

My research focuses on the relationship between biology and engineering in the 21st century, looking specifically at the emerging field of synthetic biology. Synthetic biologists are striving to make biology easier, cheaper and more reliable to engineer. Coming from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, they share a vision that engineering principles and practices like standardization, modularization and abstraction will prove as useful for ‘building with biology’ as they do for designing non-living systems. This talk will explore how ideas, promises and practices from biology and engineering are being negotiated in synthetic biology. In particular, I will focus on early efforts to define standards for the field. BioBrickTM standard biological parts were initially presented as tools to make genetic engineering more efficient and reliable, and have been accompanied by a particular imagination of innovation and value creation in synthetic biology. However, exploring the practices of synthetic biology reveals multiple sites of ambivalence and contestation over the design and use of standardized biological parts. I show how early negotiations over the promises and practices surrounding BioBricks have helped to configure the epistemic foundations and design space of the field, and are contributing to the making of value in synthetic biology.

October 10, 2016

Cathy Gere

Associate Professor of History, UCSan Diego

&

Kamala Visweswaran

Professor of Ethnic Studies, UC San Diego

Science Studies and Merchants of Doubt in the Textbook Wars

Cathy Gere will tell the story of the sociologist of science who gave testimony on behalf of Christian fundamentalists in a battle over ‘intelligent design’ in biology textbooks. Kamala Visweswaran will then describe how her science studies training enabled key interventions against textbook lobbies led by Hindu nationalists. The discussion of these two cases will be framed by Naomi Oreskes’ concept of ‘Merchants of Doubt,’ and will spotlight the relationship between cultural politics and critical epistemology in the field of science studies.

October 17, 2016

Anthropology Faculty

Anthropology of Science: a discussion

"Laboratory Ethnography." "The Anthropology of Reason." "Science in Action." These phrases characterize approaches in Science Studies, signaling our deep intellectual and methodological debts to the discipline of anthropology. In its turn, anthropology has, in recent decades, turned its analytical gaze on the institutions and cultures of science, medicine, and technology. For this session of the Science Studies Colloquium, we have invited our colleagues from the UCSD Anthropology Department to come and talk with us about the relationship between our fields, and to discuss the possibility of deepening and strengthening the ties between our programs.

What are the connections between our fieldwork practices? How might we learn from one another? Should anthropology graduate students get training in science studies, and should science studies students learn methods and approaches from anthropology? What is the role of political advocacy in both disciplines? This session will be in the form of an open discussion of these and many other questions, and should be of interest to anyone with a stake in the past, present, and future of either field.

October 24, 2016

Sharon Crasnow

Distinguished Professor Emerita, Philosophy, Norco College

Standpoint theory: epistemology from methodology?

Feminist standpoint methodology as practiced by feminist social scientists has informed feminist epistemology. The approach admonishes social scientists to “start from the lives of women” in order to produce knowledge that is for, by, and about them. A motivation for the approach is as members of a subordinated social group women have access to evidence in their everyday experiences that is not available through other, more traditional, scientific methods and is relevant to liberatory knowledge projects. One of the key tenets of standpoint theories is that those who are oppressed, marginalized, or otherwise outside of the dominant power structure have access to knowledge of that power structure in ways that the dominant members of society do not. They are epistemically privileged in this respect. But the admonition to start from the “lives of women” is problematic. Women are not a homogeneous group – their experiences vary both as individuals and as members of different social groups and so the transition to epistemology from standpoint methodology becomes problematic since it is difficult to identify the knower(s). Looking at how feminist standpoint works as a method – how feminist social scientists produce knowledge in practice – emphasizes the socio-political aspects of knowledge communities: how they are formed, for what purposes, and the extent to which they are stable. To turn standpoint approaches from methodology to epistemology requires giving an account of the socio-political aspects of knowledge communities and their formation. I sketch such and account and in doing so argue that it requires an account of identity. Consequently I also consider the extent to which different currently available accounts of identity – individual, group identities, and their intersections – can work for a standpoint epistemology.

October 31, 2016

Yelena Gluzman

PhD Candidate, Communications and Science Studies, UC San Diego

&

Sarah Klein

PhD Candidate, Communications and Science Studies, UC San Diego

Skeletons in the Archive: A Feminist Theory Theater reading of the Science Studies Program

Texts happen. A text never exists until it is performed, whether alone in your office, in a seminar, or on a stage. Each situation makes a difference in the way that a text’s effects congeal. This special Halloween edition of the Science Studies Colloquium introduces Feminist Theory Theater (FTT), an experimental reading practice that foregrounds the embodied and social conditions of interpreting theoretical and archival texts. FTT follows feminist theory in its emphasis on collective, situated meaning-making, that is to say, what we call theater.

In FTT, small groups of participants work together to devise provisional stagings of a text as a way to make emerging interpretations available to the group. Putting the text “on its feet” is not done to create a finished show, but rather as a mode of working, thinking, and taking on an argument with our bodies. There is no audience in Feminist Theory Theater; readers are performers, and spectatorship is a mode of attuning to each other.

Taking up the seasonal theme of hauntings, together we will read an archival document from the history of UCSD’s Science Studies Program. The reflexive orientation is not meant to to be salacious or confessional, but is rather an opening into a distributed exploration of our institutional history. Because talking about FTT is best done by participating in FTT, this colloquium will be in a workshop format. To invite the participation of SSP specters, ghosts, and ghouls, the workshop will be held at the Mandeville Suite, on the top floor of Tioga Hall. Costumes are welcome but not required.

November 7, 2016

Martine Lappe

Post Doctoral Fellow, Center for Research on Ethical, Legal & Social Implications of Pyschiatric, Neurologic & Behavioral Genetics, Columbia University

Constructing Early-Life in the Lab: Maternal Care and the Production of Adversity in Environmental Epigenetics

Environmental epigenetics focuses on how social forces – including pollution, nutrition, stress, trauma, and care – become molecularly embodied, affect gene expression without changing DNA sequence, and produce durable changes that may influence the health and behavior of individuals, their offspring, and future generations. In recent years, this area of molecular biology has captured the attention of life and social scientists, physicians, policymakers, and the public. In this talk, I describe how maternal care has become a central epistemic object in research on the epigenetic effects of early-life adversity. My analysis draws on two years of ethnographic research in an epigenetics laboratory in the United States. Building on work in feminist science studies, I examine the politics of care as it is enacted with research samples, experimental protocols, and behavioral endpoints in experiments on model organisms. My findings point to tensi ons between researchers’ care for the data and their measurement of adversity as a discrete variable in the form of maternal interaction, neglect, and abuse. I argue that these tensions suggest a complex assemblage of allowed and invisible environments that are actively shaping understandings of the biological and social, including expectations of women as mothers. This study suggests that the holistic explanations of health and development promised by environmental epigenetics are simultaneously constructed and constrained by its practices. In conclusion, I consider what these findings signal for social scientists’ engagement with environmental epigenetics and postgenomic science today.

November 14, 2016

Matt Wisnioski

Every American an Innovator: How Innovation Became a Way of Life

To innovate is the 21st century’s defining imperative. Nation states develop innovation systems to compete in a fast-moving global economy. Companies vie for market share and talent by claiming their cultures are the most innovative. Universities seek to turn discovery into intellectual property. Aid workers utilize smartphone apps to improve global health. Whatever our chosen avocation each of us is compelled to survive in a world of “continuous change.” From where do these ideas about innovation and innovators come? What does their history reveal about the ambitions and realities of our society? How are they embodied in images of self and in daily practices? Finally, how can awareness of this history shape current and future approaches to socio-technical change?

This talk shows how innovation became a “way of life” in the United States from the 1960s to today. I highlight two crucial dimensions of this process. First, the rise of innovation expertise—the methods and practices designed to enhance innovative activity. And second, the composite images of innovators that such expertise creates. I chart the growth of a network of entrepreneurial scientists, inventors, artists, government bureaucrats, venture capitalists, US presidents, and thousands of everyday people. In this nexus of expertise and imagination, I identify cross-cutting themes that characterize how visions and practices of innovation shape aspirations at the societal, but also the personal, level. I conclude with a call for critical participation that bridges the gap between the “how can we?” questions of innovation practitioners with the “why” questions of science studies scholars.

November 21, 2016

Rebecca Hardesty

PhD Candidate, Communication and Science Studies, UC San Diego

&

Ben Sheredos

Post-Doctoral Researcher, Center for Circadian Biology, UC San Diego

PhD '16, Philosophy and Cognitive Science , UC San Diego

A Cross-Disciplinary Exploration of Interdisciplinarity in Science Studies

Interdisciplinarity is a common goal in humanistic and social scientific studies of science. However, operating within multiple disciplines, each with their own distinct theoretical and methodological traditions, presents problems of legibility. This is especially true when a social scientist does philosophically informed work, and when a philosopher does empirically-informed work. Outsiders in other fields can overlook the work's novelty, viewing it as mainstream. Insiders doing more traditional work within a field can misunderstand the purpose of interdisciplinary research, and may view it as failing to meet traditional standards. In these two talks, Rebecca Hardesty and Dr. Ben Sheredos will demonstrate how it is productive, but difficult, to take unabashedly interdisciplinary approaches to examine practices within the biological sciences.

December 5, 2015

No Colloquium

Finals Week

January 9, 2017

Science Studies Program Meeting

SSP faculty and students only

January 16, 2017

No Colloquium

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

January 23, 2017

Hal Pashler

Distinguished Professor

Department of Psychology, UC San Diego

What’s Wrong with Fishing Around in Data? A Priors Heterogeneity Analysis

The “Replicability Movement” that has arisen in recent years has drawn a great deal of new attention to the idea that research studies (including hypotheses, measures, and analytical strategies) ought to be specified in advance to reduce what are sometimes called Investigator Degrees of Freedom. This sort of "confirmatory" research (as against an "exploratory" or "fishing around" type of research) is widely recommended as offering the only reliable route to firm knowledge about empirical relationships studied in the context of measurement error. I contend that the rationale for this recommendation is less clear than is widely assumed. Using a series of simplified statistical simulations of the research and data generation process, I find that while confirmatory research has certain benefits, it does not automatically confer benefits in terms of the likelihood that published results will be true (positive predictive value, or PPV). However, I show that a gain in PPV is predicted when one assumes that investigators are heterogeneous in the base rates for the truth of the hypotheses they formulate. I will also discuss additional simulations examining the utility of a mixed exploration/confirmation strategies. I show that on the simplest starting assumptions, a recommended mixed strategy actually performs worse than an exploration-only approach.

January 30, 2017

Hannah Landecker

Associate Professor

Department of Sociology, UCLA

The "Butcher’s Philosophy": Situating Human Health in a Metabolic Landscape

In 1934, nutrition scientist Clive McCay warned that children were being raised with an attitude to growth that he called “the butcher’s philosophy”: the desire to bring animals to market weight quickly and efficiently. This talk excavates the butcher’s philosophy of the twentieth century and its consequences for the chemical landscapes of life in the twenty-first century. The history of medicated feed for animals in the twentieth century has traditionally been seen as a rather specialized corner of agricultural history: the story of how antibiotics, arsenicals, hormones, and vitamins were used to grow animals to market size earlier with less feed is an important part of the industrialization of American food systems. Yet it is also the history of a major re-articulation of the metabolic interrelations of bacteria, fungi, plants, animals, and humans, in which flows of enzymes, amino acids, and secondary metabolites between o rganisms changed profoundly. This talk uses insights from this history to rethink frameworks for investigating the relationship between diet and health, arguing for experimental and epidemiological approaches that are better equipped to take account of the historically-specific metabolic landscapes of human development and health.

February 6, 2017

Joyce Havstad

Assistant Professor

Department of Philosophy, Oakland University

PhD'14, Philosophy and Science Studies, UC San Diego

Forty Years After Lab Life

What kind of results do ethnographies produce? Here I re-examine one particularly well-known and influential ethnography: Latour and Woolgar's "Laboratory Life." I argue that, in the decades since publication, the results of Latour and Woolgar's study have been at least somewhat scientized by science studies scholars—as is, we have tended to treated them as though they have a degree of applicability and longevity beyond that of the particular time, place, and culture in which they were obtained. But what about our ethnographic practice supports such generalization and endurance? Here I document a retrospective ethnography designed and conducted in order to test the viability of our scientization of such results.

February 13, 2017

Sarah Milov

Assistant Professor

Corcoran Department of History, University of Virginia

Smoke Ring: From American Tobacco to Japanese Data

February 20, 2017 (President's Day Holiday)

Audrey Lackner

PhD Candidate, History and Science Studies, UC San Diego

February 27, 2017

Matthew J. Brown

Associate Professor

Department of Philosophy and History of Ideas, UT Dallas

Science and Moral Imagination: A New Ideal for Values in Science

What is the role of values in science? What are the ethical and political responsibilities of scientists qua scientists? I describe and defend a new approach to these questions based on the concept of "moral imagination" from recent work in ethics. According to the ideal of moral imagination, scientists should be encouraged and trained to recognize contingencies or decision-points in their research, to creatively explore possible options, to empathetically recognize potential stakeholders, and to discover morally salient aspects and consequences of their decisions, and make decisions that harmonize across ethical and epistemic considerations as far as possible. Furthermore, I argue that these contingencies that occasion value judgment are pervasive in scientific practice, at every level and stage. My account emphasizes the positive aspects of the interaction of science and values, and provides primarily prospective guidance for scientists ma king value-laden decisions in situ. In this talk, I will give special attention to the different way this ideal plays out in individual decision-making in scientific inquiry, in the primary sociality of science (socially distributed cognition in the laboratory and research group), and in the secondary sociality of science (the processes of credibility and certification in the scientific discipline or community).